CHAPTER XXXII: PAREE!
Except for the cab-drives between quay and station at Southampton and Havre, and three half-days in Rouen, I had seen no town whatsoever outside North Devon. Paree! Paree! my heart kept crying.
Now "Pariss" was a poor flat word, and "Pary" too, as the French pronounce it; but by dropping the English S while Englishifying the French vowel I formed a darling word which my heart could caress and unwearyingly repeat, thus giving fullest vent to the delight it anticipated. It was Paree! Paree! all the way in the train and on the magical twilight drive from St. Lazare Station (gloomy hole enough) down the great boulevards, past the looming Madeleine, along the Rue Royale, across the great Concord Place, and over the sheeny river to the family "hotel" in the Faubourg. Such a glorious city, such princely streets and monuments I had never pictured, never been able to picture. Paree! Paree!
There were walks and drives with Elise and Suzanne, visits to museums, galleries, churches; though from all theatres and concerts, following the solemn promise to my Grandmother, I was debarred. The brilliant new boulevards were my chief interest. It was often a morbid interest: to see the crowds, laughing or careworn, hideous deformities, vile pockmarked faces, hunger jostling with gluttony; everywhere hurrying gesticulating Mammon. I hated them, loathed them with a physical loathing that held something of puritanism and patriotism combined: I longed for England, for goodness, for the ugly unworldliness and cleanness of the Saints. Now and then a gentle-faced little boy (for the little girls were for the most part precocious over-dressed apers of the women they would become) lit up my heart with a moment's delight: I would turn round and stare as he passed, hoping he too would turn and stare.
Our most frequent pilgrimage was to the Great Exhibition, a faery wilderness of gardens and fountains, of pavilions, pagodas and pinnacles. We witnessed the Imperial distribution of the prizes in the Great Hall. On a dais sat the Emperor—my Emperor: Man of Destiny, Parrot-Face, Waxworks, Long-Body, the prince of the kings of the earth—surrounded by kings, with the Sultan on his right hand, and pride everywhere. When the little Prince Imperial advanced to his father with the prize for workmen's dwellings, wild applause searched the very roof of the glass palace of Industry. The Emperor smiled, smiled dismally I thought, for the eyes were sad, wretched. ("Queretaro, Queretaro." His brain rang like a beaten bell. He had learnt the news today, though none of his subjects yet knew. While we saw a Sovereign adulated by the world, he saw another Sovereign—his client king—and a Mexican court-yard, and a firing party. Did he see also the selfsame day three years ahead: himself, and the preening Sultan at his right hand, prisoners both in exile and disgrace?)
Kings, everywhere Kings. For this was the year, more truly than Talleyrand's, when your carriage could not move through the streets of Paris because they were blocked with Kings. I do not think I missed a single royal visit—except the King of the Belgians', as I was seedy that day. The girls, even the Countess, made fun of my courtly mania: I did not care, I studied the newspapers, and made sure of the best view-points in each procession. Then I would stand for hours, in patient royalism, fully rewarded by the instant's pomp and the dear glance at the Lord's Anointed. There was the barbarous Tsar, with the Cæsarevitch and the young Grand Duke, his brother. Old Prussia with his big minister, one Count von Bismarck-Schoenhausen, who liked France—so well that he visited it again. Austrian Franz-Josef and the ill-fated Empress. Our own hearty Prince of Wales. Lesser truck: Sweden, Wurtemberg, Portugal, Greece; with the two Louis of Bavaria, the one that loved Lola Montes and the other that loved Wagner.
So the quick scenes shifted, with the actors princes all: till my mind was raced through by glittering equipages and the remembered faces of the great.